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PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.

Anita Rao
In 2019 Tina Strawn reached a breaking point in her relationship with her country.

Tina Strawn
I have lived and followed the rules and been a good citizen and paid my taxes and done all of these things, and why can't we breathe?

Anita Rao
At that moment in time, Tina was in her 40s, a mother to three adult children, and living near Dallas, Texas, the frustration she felt about being a black queer woman in the US was sitting heavy.

Tina Strawn
That was the moment of just recognizing we do not want to live this way. And there was something inside of me that said there is another way. It was almost a draw of there's something more that you can do.

Anita Rao
So in the summer of 2020, amidst a global pandemic and throngs of protesters taking to the streets, Tina turned that hypothetical dream to leave the US into a reality. She divorced her country for good. This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao

¹ÏÉñapp Clip
in the 24 hours after the re election of Donald Trump to the presidency, Google searches for how to move out of the US and easiest countries to move to from USA surged more than 1300%.

Anita Rao
That CBS ¹ÏÉñapp YouTube, short marks a historically significant moment for decades. Gallup has been polling Americans of various political parties about their desires to settle elsewhere, and while there's always been some number of folks who want to leave that percentage today is triple what it was in the 1970s but there is a big gap between desire and actual follow through. So how did those Americans who want to break up with the US decide when it's actually time to go?

Tina Strawn
I will place that moment at 2019 when I heard about the year of return in Ghana, and it was a year to commemorate 400 years since enslaved Africans had been stolen and bought, and the transatlantic slave trade brought them to the Americas, and Ghana was in the process of welcoming folks across the African diaspora to return to the motherland, and that was kind of the beginning of thinking, what could life look like if I didn't live in the United States of America?

Anita Rao
Tina Strawn is a writer, an activist and the author of, Are we free yet the black queer guide to divorcing America today, we're talking about what led her to embark on expat life and what happened after she made that life changing decision. She describes her experience as part of a movement known as blacks. It a term that describes a modern day resurgence of black people leaving the US.

Tina Strawn
I remember finding a couple like two black Americans who had left the states, and one in particular was a young black woman who had been formerly incarcerated, and she was just talking about her life that she had started over in Vietnam. And so right around the time, as I mentioned, hearing about the year of return in Ghana, but then doing some further research and learning that Ghana has a lot of homophobic and transphobic legislation that they have passed and that have been that are being enforced, I realized that that would not be the safest place. I was married to my wife at that time, so started to look for other countries, and as I was doing that initial research, that's when I came across these black American expats, and this one woman in particular who was living in Vietnam, and that was kind of my first place. And I was like, I wonder my wife and I, if at the time, could we start over and see what Vietnam has to offer.

Anita Rao
I want to understand more about what was going on in your personal life. You mentioned safety being a reason why you were looking to move and thinking specifically about where you would want to go. What were what was going on in your relationship with the US around safety in that moment.

Tina Strawn
So I'm going to go back to July of 2016 at that time, I was at the peak of my fitness career, living in a suburb of Atlanta, and I remember in July of 2016 scrolling on Facebook, and I accidentally saw the videos of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling being killed by police. And those two incidents in particular broke me. It would just change my life. They would just change my life. And so I would begin a period of racial awakening and awareness, and then that would lead me kind of into a bit of politics. By the time. You know, Trump was elected the first time. I attended the women's march in Atlanta with people all across the world, millions of people, and that was kind of my entrance into politics. And so I would then spend the next couple of years working with local grassroots organizations for the Democrats, and we would ultimately be working to get Stacey Abrams elected as governor of Georgia, and I'll be honest at the end of that. And the result of that being Brian Kemp really doing a lot as a Secretary of State to suppress votes, I just realized it was kind of my moment of awakening, that even in the political system, I was not seeing the the freedom that I know that as black folks in this country, we have been striving for. So it was around these particular incidents and coming to the realization that, yeah, what if I don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting? Is there another way?

Anita Rao
You mentioned these narratives of like political instability and these broader stories of safety and safety for black folks in this country, you were also experiencing some financial insecurity. There was this moment in November 19 when you found a note on the door of the house that you were renting with your then wife. It became another kind of pivotal turning point in your story. Can you take me to that moment and what that note said?

Tina Strawn
Yeah, we had just relocated to back to Texas. We were both from Texas, and I had quit my career. This is when I retired from fitness to do my racial and social justice work full time because she was in tech and was able to support us financially. But the reality was that despite the fact that she was making really great money, we were struggling, and it didn't make sense. We just found ourselves going, how are we supposed to get ahead, and that note in the door was a letter addressed to the owners of the house that we were renting with an offer to do a short sale on the house. And that keyed us into even though we've been paying our rent, the owners have not been paying the bank. So this house looks like it's about to go into foreclosure, and at that point, there was a moment of panic. There was like, Well, what do we do? We've been paying this very large amount for rent, and we not only have lost that, we don't know where that money's gone, so it's likely we're also going to lose our deposit and have to find another place to move. So that was a moment where we just had to step back and just say, what are we doing, and is this the life that we want to live? And is there a way to do it differently? You know, we were lower middle class, but then just the realization that in order to just hold on to the positionality where we were, the financial pressure and strain was just becoming too much, I was just starting to think about my family. And the racial wealth gap in the United States continues to increase, and black people, black families, continue to have such a fraction of what white counterparts have. And so that was just really starting to be something that we were feeling into very deeply and realizing we didn't want to play this game anymore. There's just we want to do something different, and we know that if we want a drastic result, we were going to have to take a drastic step.

Anita Rao
So the first drastic step you took was deciding to become nomadic. You all got rid of like, 95% of your stuff. Tell me about that process, and what was the 5% that you kept?

Tina Strawn
That's a great question. So we would keep very little. We would keep the Momentums. You know, I again, I'm a mother of three, so I had stuff from when my kids were little. At this point, all three of my children were adults and living on their own. It really was a matter of, we only wanted to keep what we could carry. And that would change a little bit. We, you know, we had two cars at the time, for example, and we called up one of the banks and said, you know, come and pick up this car. You know, voluntarily surrendered it back to them, and we would just pack up a couple of suitcases, what we could fit into those suitcases and drive around in the one car that we kept. And initially the plan was that we would be nomadic, as I was traveling around the country leading screenings and discussions of HBO documentary true justice Bryan Stevenson's fight for equality. So I had these different types of speaking engagements and events all around the country. So our plan was to just drive around. She was working remotely at the time, so she could do that. And in September, I had some work lined up in Durban, South Africa, and that was going to be our opportunity to make our official black sit and leave the country. But then, as you know. Happened. By the time March arrived, so did COVID 19, everything shut down, and the work all went away. And so we were stuck until we could figure out what we were going to do next.

Anita Rao
So the pandemic happened, and then your wife of over seven years asked to go on a break, and you use the term in your book divorcing the US to describe the process of starting a life outside the country. But you also draw these parallels to the separation and divorce that you two began to undergo. What were some of the parallels between those two experiences for you?

Tina Strawn
When she made the decision to leave and wanted to separation, I did not see it coming. I was unprepared at this point. So a time frame in which she left, she would leave, I want to say the day after Mother's Day The following week, my oldest daughter would have a mental health crisis that would have her hospitalized for a short period of time, and that was, you know, incredibly terrifying for me as a mother. And then the following week, George Floyd was killed, so I spent that summer in just deep grief, and I was kind of vacillating between the grief of my wife's decision to end our marriage, as well as the grief I was feeling as a black person in the United States, and so just realizing that as I was doing my grieving and my healing, that I was saying goodbye And closing this relationship with my wife simultaneously I was saying goodbye and ending my relationship with the United States.

Anita Rao
We'll hear where Tina decided to start her journey as an expat. Just ahead you're listening to embodied from North Carolina public radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We'll be right back. This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao today we're talking about one queer, black woman's decision to leave the US to find freedom and pleasure. Tina strawns journey started as an idea in 2019 and became a reality in the summer of 2020 her reasons for leaving the country were both personal and political, a swirling storm of dismay, rage and grief that culminated in a conviction to finally prioritize her own well being, no matter how drastic the measure. She writes about her experience in the book, Are we free yet the black queer guide to divorcing America, which includes this poem:

Tina Strawn
My courage has come in knowing that I can only change my location and my participation in this toxic relationship I choose to leave today I accept that I cannot make America love black people Today I accept that I cannot make America stop killing black people. Today I accept that I cannot make America pay black people reparations. Today I accept that I cannot make America provide universal health care or legalize weed nationwide or release anyone in prison for weed related charges. I can't make America care about gun control. I can't make America give about the climate and our planet that we are actively destroying with colonialism, capitalism and corporate greed, my serenity, my peace, is granted in my wisdom, my ability and my faith to get myself free.

Anita Rao
Tina called that a poem about serenity. In the year before Tina left the US, she had already begun the process of purging her belongings and becoming a financial minimalist, then her wife asked her for a divorce, ending their seven year marriage. And it was in this context that she got a phone call.

Tina Strawn
It would be July of 2020, when I would a friend would call me and tell me that Jamaica's borders were open, and did I want to just, you know, go to Jamaica for a bit? And I was like, Sure, why not? Because at this point, you know, I'm grieving, and I don't really have a plan. I know I have to now start my life over from scratch. And the reality is, I had to make a decision, am I going to start my life over from scratch in the States, or do I want to take a risk and try to start my life over outside of the states. So I would arrive in Jamaica and fall in love with that country. It was the perfect place to hold me while I grieved, while I did my beginning phases of some of my healing. And that was when I started to realize, Oh, I'm not just grieving my. A wife. I'm grieving all that it has meant to me to be American and be black, and I was also having a different experience because I'm in Jamaica. It's a poor country. It is a predominantly black country, and one of the things I noticed almost immediately upon arriving in Jamaica is how safe I felt, and just the way that my nervous system had a reaction and a response just landing there. And there were a lot of different components to that. I think one of the components is that I just, I saw black people everywhere. The majority of the folks that I was seeing all of the time were black people. And, you know, again, this is during COVID. So one thing about Jamaica, and this would be the case for the entire year that I live there, is they were for the entirety of the COVID 19 pandemic. In those early first two years, the country was on either a full or complete lockdown or curfew of some sort. So as a poor black country, they were taking this pandemic very seriously, and so it felt much safer to be there. And that was just something that I decided I need to follow this like my body is signaling something to me, and I want this to lead me. And I talk about this in the book of other black Americans who also made decisions to leave the United States for safety. James Baldwin is someone who I admire tremendously and resonate a lot with his work and in particular, some of the conclusions that he came to around being black in America versus here is what it has felt like being black outside of the United States. So I would eventually discover that I was following a long legacy of other black Americans who had done what I had done. I just I wasn't aware of it at the time. And so that was something else that was really exciting to me about the black SIP movement, this this black social and political movement that was following in the footsteps of our ancestors, but it's still not mainstream, and I'm excited that people are now starting to just listen and start to pull that thread and allow it to take them really where they really had no idea that they were going to go, but that that place can lead absolutely to their own liberation.

Anita Rao
So why Jamaica and you know, anti blackness is everywhere. There are colonial roots and the legacy in Jamaica, what made it feel like that was going to be a safe landing for you as a country?

Tina Strawn
I had no idea that Jamaica was going to be that place for me. As a matter of fact, when I was in San Francisco, July of 2020, I was really, at that point, waiting for Vietnam's borders to open up, because I had still been kind of focused on, you know, going back to my original plan, you know, back in 2019 of let me look at Vietnam. And while I did that, while I was waiting, a friend just called and was like, Hey, do you want to go to Jamaica? The original plan was not to move there and live there. It was to just be there and kind of kind of wait out COVID A bit. So I would realize, upon being there, how my body felt, how I felt in my body, and that would lead me to decide that I feel safer here than going back. And what am I going back for? I was going to leave the country anyway, so that's what led me to be there for the next year.

Anita Rao
As you think back to those early days in Jamaica, are there any moments that come to mind where you kind of found yourself doing this calculus of what is different for me here as a queer black woman, and what's the same? How am I experiencing the world differently? How am I being read differently by people around me?

Tina Strawn
Yeah, that was actually pretty culture shock for me in a variety of different ways. First of all, as I referenced, you know, I was mostly seeing black folks so that for my body, signaled a sense of safety. But something else that I noticed was as a woman, and it's a very, you know, religious Christian society also, so it's very patriarchal. I guess in some ways, I did not feel as safe as a woman, but that was much smaller of a sensation in my body than just the the sensation of I am surrounded by black folks, primarily. So that was something that I would start to feel a little bit more. Another thing that was interesting was learning that even though I am black in a Black Country, I am American, and that was also when I started to begin to understand more of my privilege as an American citizen with that coveted blue passport. It was just very strange to experience the perception of me as an American and the assumption that I must have money when I. And certainly feel that I had money, I was I became a minimalist so that I could afford to live outside of the United States and not knowing what to expect. So that would be a journey, honestly, Anita that I'm still on. So that's something that I continue to wrestle with and unpack and question and have a lot of curiosity around.

Anita Rao
Yeah, as I hear you talking, I want to bring up this kind of tension that I've heard a lot in recent months, as more people are talking about leaving the US after President Trump's election, and folks who have been really involved, as you have, with anti racism, work here, and there's this tension of, you know, not everyone has the resources or capacity to leave, so if we do leave, are we giving up on those who can't leave? How have you reconciled with this question?

Tina Strawn
I reconcile with this question from the perspective of everyone needs to do what they can to get free for some folks that will mean leaving, and for some folks that will mean staying, we have to acknowledge that, yes, there is privilege in the decision to leave, because, as you said, not everyone can leave, and it really is a matter of each individual deciding, you know, to what degree they are leaving, right? What are you leaving? For me, my work in the States has continued this entire time. I've stayed very involved and very active as a choice, and one of the things that has changed for me, really over the past several months is that I do want to step a little bit further away from the work that I was doing in the States, because I have community of black folks, in particular, black Americans, other American expats, that are wanting to take this tremendous risk and this leap and leave. And so I want to focus more of my energy on those folks. I think a lot about Harriet Tubman, and I think about what she had to endure as she was taking so many enslaved people off of plantations into freedom and in much of the same ways, she could not take everyone. Some folks couldn't. They just for a variety of reasons, couldn't, and other folks just didn't want to and that is okay. That is a reality that she grappled with where she chose to take action, is that she knew that there was a pathway off of these plantations, and for the folks that wanted to take that step and walk into and create what a liberated life could look like for themselves. That was her focus. So I have arrived, and I am still arriving, and it's still again, something that I wrestle with of my role and being clear about what my purpose is and it is for the folks who choose to leave and even in the spaces where I am among many Americans who have chosen to leave, there are a variety of circumstances and scenarios. We don't all have, you know, six figures in our savings built up before we decide to take that step. We don't all have nine to five remote jobs or digital nomads, those are not my experiences. I'm a writer, I'm a consultant. I've been an activist full time for these past several years, and I have still figured it out, and I have met so many folks who are living abroad, who have also really gotten creative in their determination to leave the states and make it work and figure it out. And so that's the conclusion where I'm at today, that everything is, you know, I'm evolving. I'm changing. All of us are, but that's where I've landed, is recognizing that my place is to be a support and encouragement. So I want everyone to do what feels best and right for them and for the folks that feel that they are ready to take that leap to divorce the States, I can offer some some guidance and some assistance.

Anita Rao
You told us a little bit earlier about the story of receiving that note on your door, and you talk in the book about other experiences that you had had throughout your life, of feeling like the credit system in the US and the financial system in the US was really trapping you in a lot of ways. I'm curious about how when you left the states, you kind of set out to prioritize things differently in this new chapter of life, to find a greater sense of freedom. Like, what were those things that felt like first priorities, to feel more free compared to some of the ways that you had felt in the US?

Tina Strawn
I think this still goes back to my journey of. Grief and my wife leaving after, you know, seven and a half years was my second divorce. I was married to my ex husband, and we were together for 11 years, so I was very familiar with the grief process of divorce. What I wasn't as familiar with was the grieving process of being American, and I began to make connections to wow, what does that mean that I am making a choice to leave air quotes the country that my ancestors built. I don't have anyone in my family that has moved and lived outside of the United States, and I also can't trace my ancestry. Well, I have not traced my ancestry back, so I don't even know where my people are from. I just know that I and this is something I talk about in the book, is just looking historically at where black folks have, what we've been through, and then looking at where we are in present day. And so what I was choosing to shift away from were the things that basically founded the United States, white supremacy, the patriarchy, capitalism, exploitation. So a part of my grieving process was to be able to recognize those things, name them, and then make an intentional choice to do what I can to divest from those things. So this is where the pleasure and the peace part arrived for me, as I was doing my my healing and recognizing that in the United States, one of the things that I felt very viscerally in my body was this inability to and this worry, this stress that came directly from, how am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to take care of my family? How am I going to take care of myself? You know, what is my future going to look like? I couldn't see a path for myself out of the as you reference, like the financial state that black folks on a whole are in and so the first thing that I kind of would work on evaluating was my relationship with capitalism and working so that has so much to do with my decision to become a minimalist, because then it was a matter of, well, I know how much money I need to live and survive in the United States, and there have been times in my life where I've made a lot of money, and even then, like, it's still, you know, the ways that the system is set up and who it is set up and designed to benefit, I still did not feel, even when I I was able to pay my bills, it almost it seemed like the more money that I made, the more our expenses increased. And I wanted to flip that and say, Okay, well, what if I decrease my expenses? So that means it won't cost as much for me to survive. And then I was able to tap into this thing called Peace. Like it felt peaceful to not have quite as much as I've had previously, but that felt, again, like something I needed to pay attention to and follow.

Anita Rao
You mentioned the search for pleasure, the search for, you know, being more in tune with what you wanted, with joy as you kind of unpack your relationship with capitalism and work, and I'd love for you to draw that connection for us between a search for pleasure and a search for liberation, maybe through your own experiences with that journey.

Tina Strawn
Sure. So again, my career is in fitness, so I was already and I'm a certified yoga teacher, so I have already had a practice of understanding what it is to be in my body, and I just believe that the more that we are attached to systems of oppression, the more we disconnect from our bodies. So as I was going through my grieving and my healing, I got some help, did some counseling. I did an intensive therapy week with a black woman therapist and a team of other black women therapists, they put together a program for me just talking about honoring our Ori, which is the spiritual and sexual nature given to every human at birth. And this is based on an African philosophy. So I began to really explore my Ori and my relationship with myself, sexually and spiritually, and how those two things really aren't separate. So it really caused me to go a little bit deeper into some of the other ways that I had suppressed my own pleasure and my right to pleasure, and the ways that I experience pleasure in my body. This would be a part of my my sexuality journey as I am, I'm queer. I identify as pansexual, and that was something that came up for me in a very big way after my wife left me. So I did that work with that team of therapists, and that was the beginning of this journey into seeking more liberation through my sexual and spiritual relationship with my. Myself, and then I even did some work with a sex doula, and that would really open my eyes so much more to making the connections between pleasure and getting free. So I am living in Jamaica. I'm grieving and healing from my wife leaving me and going through my second divorce. I'm grieving and healing as a black American who's made the decision to divorce America and start my black set journey, and I'm also tapping into so what is on the other side, if I'm going to walk away from the United States and from monogamy and marriage, what do I want to walk into? And that is what led me into this seeking of pleasure and peace as a foundation and prioritizing my peace and my pleasure by any means necessary, which would then also lead me into this journey of non monogamy and being solo poly. And I was monogamous and in two marriages for almost 19 years, and my marriages were not toxic or abusive, and I still felt that if I am going to be on a journey of decolonizing all of these systems of oppression, I want to explore what that could even mean and how free I could be and feel in my personal relationships, in my sex and my dating and my love life, and that just opened up an entire new world for me.

Anita Rao
We'll get the rest of Tina's story in just a moment, as she describes day to day life as a black, queer American woman living in Costa Rica, and she'll respond to some listener questions about what it's really like to leave the US for good as always. You can follow us on Instagram at embodied W UNC, and you can hear the podcast version of the show by following embodied on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.

This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. There's a surge of interest among Americans to move away from this country. For most people, that interest stays in the confines of a Google rabbit hole. But today, we're talking with someone who turned that pipe dream into reality. Tina Strawn made her official exodus from the United States of America in july 2020 as a queer black woman, her desire for safety guided her to new communities and ways of life beyond the US. She moved first to Jamaica and then to Costa Rica, where she's been building a robust community and romantic life.

Tina Strawn
Costa Rica has legalized gay marriage, and it is a welcoming and inclusive country, even though it it's still on the conservative side, is still largely a Catholic country, and that is kind of felt and seen in the the structure of the communities, as well as the holidays, and just just the way that the country operates, and yet the people are so loving and friendly and kind. Pura Vida is the kind of the Costa Rican saying for a reason, and it's translated as pure life, but it also is used as a greeting and a and a salutation, and just we say it all the time, and that's the feeling of it. And so being a queer, black American woman in this country feels very welcoming. It feels very safe. And that is a notable difference from being queer and black and American and woman in the United States.

Anita Rao
You have three children. How did they feel about your decision to leave the US, and what is it like to try to sustain a connection with them from afar?

Tina Strawn
Yeah, they did not have big feelings about me leaving the US. I mean, we were already living in different states. Anyway, my oldest daughter currently is finishing up her law degree at Berkeley, so she's in California. My two youngest live together in Atlanta, and I had been nomadic again in early 2020, so the conversations really have been very fluid. Ironically, I have spent much more time with them since I have lived out of the states, and I did when I was living in the States. I think maybe that has to do with just intentionality around it, but also the ways that we connect. And that's we, everybody, the global we is we have so much technology to help with that, so I still am able to stay very connected to them through all the different, you know, devices and ways that we stay connected to each other today, FaceTime, zoom, WhatsApp, all of it. And so I just think communication in general as a species, for us on a planet when we are living at a time with. All of this technology, the ways that we communicate and interact with one another and stay in touch, it looks so much more virtual than it used to. So it hasn't been a barrier, thankfully.

Anita Rao
So you mentioned just now this experience of feeling really welcomed in Costa Rica, but you talked earlier also about this constant reckoning with having a blue passport as an American. And I'm curious about kind of how those two things intersect in terms of how you find community and friends, and have kind of built your social life where you are balancing the privilege and the being an outsider with the desire to belong and find connections. How do you approach that?

Tina Strawn
There have been tremendous connection points through Black Set the black set groups that exist so both in Jamaica and in Costa Rica, there are large numbers of folks in black expat groups here that bring us together. So I actually have quite a full social life and community that I'm a part of here with other black Americans that live all around Costa Rica, and we, you know, everything from in the little town where I live, there's not just other black Americans, there are queer black Americans, there are disabled black Americans, there are young folks, there are older folks. And so we have, you know, the Black Soot community, that we just have communities all over the world, and I think that's one of the reasons that the black sit movement has become so appealing to so many black folks. Because, yeah, for those who want to leave and are like, well, I won't, but I won't know anybody here. A lot of black folks are making decisions to go to countries where there is already an established community of other black expats. So that's something that I can I've experienced, which has been really beautiful. And then the other side of that is that it is important to me to not show up in Costa Rica, or even in Jamaica with colonizer energy. You know, I acknowledge that I am a guest here. The local Costa Rican people call themselves ticos, ticos and tikas and and so making sure, like, for example, I live in a Tico part of town. I live among the locals, so I don't, personally, you know, live around primarily, or predominantly, other American expats or expats from other countries. I live with the local folks, and that's where, and I don't have a car. That's, again, another part of my minimalism. So I spend a lot of time, you know, walking and being in the town and interacting with the local folks, and, you know, do my best to be intentional about spending money with the local folks and so that. And as I am continuing to work on learning Spanish, I've lived in Costa Rica now for a little over three years, and I still am not fluent, but I do just fine it, and I'm getting better, it's a priority of mine to to be fluent, and I believe that the more that I'm the longer that I'm here, and the more that I continue to study I will be, but that also is an important factor for me, is making sure that I am including in my community and in in my everyday life. How am I interacting with the local people as as a guest?

Anita Rao
We asked our listeners for questions they would pose to someone who has lived as an expat for a number of years. So I'm gonna pose these to you, and let's do rapid rapid fire ish style so we can get as many folks questions answered as possible. If you're down with that, does that sound okay to you? Let's do it. Okay. Okay. Katie and Krista both wanted to know whether you have been limited, practically or legally, in where you have been able to move and stay.

Tina Strawn
I have an experience being limited where I can move and stay. It has been a matter of what I can afford. And you know, I think it is an option for folks when they decide that they want to leave out the country they can, you know, live as extravagantly as you want to, if that's what you can afford, or you can live as minimally. And so I've chosen to live minimally, and that's been the primary factor in where I can go. I'll also say that having found myself having lived in Jamaica and Costa Rica, both places, I did not have any, no intention of moving to. It just has happened that way, so I didn't do any research ahead of time, so I can't speak to other places and and maybe barriers to where folks can live. But I know that for myself, I've not had any issues or restrictions in where I could live.

Anita Rao
Okay, Helen was curious specifically about visas. Have you had to obtain visas? Do you have any advice about that from other folks in the black, sick community?

Tina Strawn
Absolutely. You're going to want to make sure that before you visit a country, you find out what their visa requirements are. The for both Jamaica. And Costa Rica. They're different. In Jamaica, the visitor visa requirements allow for up to three months upon arrival in the country, but a total of six months total for the entire calendar year. And so that's the max amount of time you can stay in Jamaica without a work visa or permit or a digital nomad visa or something like that. In Costa Rica, they've recently relaxed their visitor visa requirements, and so now, basically, upon entering the country, as American citizens, we we get stamped for six months, and there's no maximum limit for how long we can be in Costa Rica, but when you get to that six month period, you just have to leave and then come back. And I do believe that the majority of folks that are here are on that visitor visa. But again, these visas vary based on the country, so you definitely want to, want to check out the the country where you are interested in visiting.

Anita Rao
Okay, so we also got a message from a woman here in Durham named Ashley who, at the time of writing, was days away from moving to Lisbon, Portugal with her husband, Cody. She gave us two reasons for why they decided to consider leaving the US. Let me share those.

Ashley
Number one, I feel psychologically assaulted in the United States almost every single day of my existence. I know that sounds harsh coming from someone who enjoys a relative amount of privilege as a college educated, first generation child of immigrants from South America, but I also identify as a black woman, and I feel like that colors every experience that I have in my life, and I think to Cody and I, we never really thought that that step to lead the country was so massive that it didn't need to be considered. And so we spent the last couple of years traveling abroad to Europe, which brings me kind of to Reason number two, Cody and I are fascinated with and spent the first seven ish years of our marriage. Co living in Durham, North Carolina, it sounds as though values about dense infrastructure third spaces really eclectic and diverse community centers felt like more of what we needed to pursue. So from Amsterdam to Paris to London to Lisbon and Barcelona. Literally, the physical infrastructure of those cities afforded multiple opportunities for folks to get to know one another, and as two child free people, we know the community is only going to become more important to us as we grow and age.

Anita Rao
So that's a little bit of Ashley's story, and after sharing that with us, she also posed this question:

Ashley
What challenges did you anticipate encountering that didn't actually wind up being challenges at all. I'm wondering what may have surprised you there.

Anita Rao
Okay, what reflections do you have for Ashley?

Tina Strawn
The first thing is how safe I would feel, and just my relationship with the police in both Jamaica and Costa Rica, I was surprised that upon interacting with the police, which I have done actually numerous times, both in Jamaica and in Costa Rica, and have that initial recognition of I have so much trauma in my body being a black American and our relationship with the police in the States. So it has taken me time for my my body and my nervous system to catch up with the fact that, oh, the police are not predatory in Costa Rica, nor in Jamaica. I have not had that experience. And so that was one of the big things that I was kind of anticipating and expecting, the that police would just be police everywhere, the same way they are in the States. And that has not been the case, which has been a tremendous relief and a huge unexpected blessing. I'll even say. The other thing that I that I was prepared for, or I suspected is that I would have more of a challenge living in a Spanish speaking country and not speaking Spanish than I've experienced even where I live again, in a very local community with other ticos, where the majority of people that live there do strictly speak Spanish, but I have developed and learned enough to where I can get by, and so it has not proven to be the barrier that I suspected that it might, and that's been really delightful.

Anita Rao
Okay, that's the end of our listener questions. I have just a couple more for you. Can you imagine yourself ever coming back to the US?

Tina Strawn
Not to live. No, I'll return to visit, and I have returned quite a bit for both visiting as well as for work opportunities. But I absolutely do not see for myself at any point returning to the United States to live. And as a matter of fact, I want my goal. You is to have to return less and less and less over the years.

Anita Rao
You left in search of freedom. Do you feel free today?

Tina Strawn
I feel more free today than I've ever felt in my life.

Anita Rao
There's a really beautiful reflection at the end of the book where you imagine what you see on your deathbed, a vision of what freedom looks like. Can you tell us about that version of freedom that you hope to witness around you at the end of your life?

Tina Strawn
Yeah, and I it's so interesting because that vision of has changed quite a bit. I envision, in particular, as that relates to what I wrote about in the book was a United States that is free, a United States that is not run by fascism or the oligarchy, a United States where the prison industrial complex has been dismantled and communities are taking care of themselves, People are able to have human rights people are able to have and afford basic needs. Reparations has begun to be distributed to the descendants of enslaved Africans. Those in the LGBTQIA plus community are no longer under attack and under assault at every way I envision people having choices about how they want to live, and having the ability to live lives that are safe, live lives that allow them to have rest and joy and peace and pleasure, and where people are taking care of themselves, and where corporations don't run everything, and where profits are not more important than people, where people are recognizing that we are the ones that hold the power, and a world where we Take our power back, think that's what I envision.

Anita Rao
You can find out more about Tina and her book at our website, embodied W unc.org you can find all episodes of embodied the radio show there and subscribe to our weekly podcast. A special thanks to Ashley, Krista, Helen and Katie for contributing to this week's show. We appreciate you. We also heard from Meg, who told us this, I've been lucky to live abroad twice, in Turkey and New Zealand back in the US for nine years. I would love to do it again, but would consider the context more. How is my presence as a privileged American going to impact the place I move? I also don't want to leave while my friends and family are vulnerable to the current administration. I'd like to move out of joy, not fear, and be welcomed back to visit. May I got in touch with us via Instagram, where you can send us a message. Stay up to date on the latest episodes and see behind the scenes content. You can follow us there at W unc.org, another way to get into get in touch with us our virtual mailbox called Speak pipe. You can find a link at the sidebar of our website, embodied W unc.org you can record any thoughts about a recent episode or pitch us something for a future show. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Nina Scott is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our technical director. Quilla wrote our theme music. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District North Carolina. Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.